The Archive of Place

In this unorthodox and intriguing book, William Turkel uses the Chilcotin Plateau, an arid and sparsely settled region of west-central British Columbia, to ask a series of questions about how we acquire and use knowledge of the past.

... This is an engaging and rewarding book. Like much recent work in British Columbia history, it writes First Nations people into the general history of the province, a hugely important project for North American histroy more generally.

An amalgam of the material and the representational, the natural and the human, place allows Turkel to move some way toward transcending the old human-environment dichotomy that bedevils the writing of environmental history.

Julie Cruikshank, author of Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination:
William Turkel’s great achievement in this book is to show how once taken-for-granted accounts of geophysical processes, Aboriginal occupancy, and colonial settler society have now come to underpin sharply conflicting understandings of history.